And I think that when it comes to the Borg, people don't want the 15-foot tall lizard monster; they want the shadow in the closet, the creak in the night. They want the mindless force of nature, the monster that wants to eat you -- not the sociopathic megalomaniac with bad skin that the Borg became in the form of the Queen.

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Personally, I think a mindless force of nature can be a great adversary for one story, maybe even two, but not on a continuing basis. What the Borg originally were, they can never quite become again, because as you say, it's the unknown that's truly frightening, and you can't unlearn knowledge.

So the key is not to go backward and try to recapture the essence of "Q Who" or "The Best of Both Worlds." The key is to find something new to say about them, or about the consequences of their existence.

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But I think the problem that many of have, is that everything new has sucked

Having said that, I do appreciate you and Mack take the time to chew the fat with us about those things and I have enjoyed your work previously, so I'll keep an open mind about what you plan to do with the current situation.

All I can say is,"I want these books NOW!" I can't wait for Greater Than The Sum and Destiny. For me, they are the Trek reads of the year. Granted, I too did not care for how the Borg were portrayed in Resistance or Before Dishonor but I attribute that to the writing not Borg overkill. I have great respect for J.M. Dillard and Peter David.They have been authors I have truly enjoyed (and I'm sure I will again) but , for whatever reason, I didn't care for the writing in these books. It seemed--I hate to say it-- sub-par. Especially when compared with the works of KRAD, Christopher Bennett and David Mack. And just to speculate what David Mack might do with the Borg... BRING IT ON!

(...)Then they assimilated Picard into Locutus. In a way, that was okay, although they were no longer just out for our technology, because they were still monsters who wanted to eat us. Only now, their method of eating us was almost literal -- they wanted to take us, harm us, rob us of ourselves, make us their slaves.

Then came Hugh, and we learned that a Borg separated from the Collective could become an individual. Then came the Borg Queen, and suddenly the Borg were no longer monsters who wanted to eat you -- now they had a personality in the form of the Queen. Now they were characters, not just monsters, and so they now had a psychology. That meant we could now categorize them, analyze them. Understand them. On top of that, VOY was giving us technobabble explaining how the Collective and its assimilation technology functioned, and showing us Borg ships that were incapacitated or that could be harmed -- showing situations where the Borg were no longer decidedly more powerful than Our Heroes in all situations.

And I think that's the problem. People are watching the wrong type of show for that. Star Trek is character-based sci-fi, not mindless-scare-you-silly horror. I'll buy that people may not like the way the Borg have been characterized. I don't understand people that don't like the very fact that the Borg were characterized at all. Because as I said characterization is exactly what Star Trek has always been about with everything only with a sci-fi twist.

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My opinion on this is that there is a good case that some of the post-BOBW Borg, including their early appearances in VOY, did make the Borg more frightening. Assimilation and enslavement are certainly scary concepts, but with Hugh and the others, we find out that the individual doesn't die during assimilation--in a way, that would be too merciful. Instead the individual is repressed, a prisoner in his/her/its' own mind, suffering the constant trauma of not only the imprisonment, but of watching him/her/itself act out the Collective's will, or becoming subsumed and become dependant on the Hive Mind, as Annika Hansen did. And the idea that individuals can come back--however scarred--from assimilation makes then all the more tragic to fight, because every Borg drone you kill is, in a way, a hostage, as much of a victim as anybody else. There is a potential future, a potential person, being snuffed out here--not a high likelyhood, granted, but ethically still a kind of enforced murder. I also thought it was interesting that, in their expansion into fluidic space, or quest for the Omega Particle, the Borg kept its threatening uniformity while shrugging off our usual associations of such society with stagnation and entropy: the Borg are not a dead-end, but are also moving forward, with goals of their own, which suddenly demands that we reconsider the Borg model of doing things beyond automatic dismissal. In particular, I think they failed to play up the idea of the Borg as an uncanny version of the Federation, where both are expansionary, Other-hungry group entities comitted to 'bettering themselves'; the Borg are both the antithesis of and eerily similar to the Federation.

The Queen, I grant, was a problem. I wouldn't have minded a figurehead, since they'd already tried that with Locutus, and I also would have bought that the Queen's personality was a chimera designed to lure Data into the Collective, programmed from the gestalt memory of millions, with multiple copies as suit the local species. It's when it became undeniable that the Borg was ruled by an individual and not just a central hub that the concept seriously undermined the Borg's credibility. A blow which was repeated each time they were handily defeated by one little starship. The producers of VOY went a long way towards crafting a Borg culture... but instead of usign that structure as a potential weapon for our heroes, fell back on easy tech solutions or personality flaws, like an other villain.

And as for the most recent instalments... as I've said before, far from making the Borg more frightening, they made the Borg appear dumb and silly; really, Resistance and Before Dishonour went as far to make the Borg less credible as a foe than VOY ever did. And that's a shaky foundation to build more Borg stories on. With any luck, these stories will feature actual Borg, the uncaring and unstoppable, and not the stupidity-plagued, revenge-driven examples we've seen of late.

Actually we do. It was in his bio shown in IAMD. Archer dies (peacefully, AFAIK) in 2245, a day after the NCC-1701 is commissioned.

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We don't know that canonically, because that portion of the bio did not appear onscreen. It's only unofficial background material, subject to contradiction. For that matter, even the parts that were shown weren't really intended to be legible, and wouldn't have been if not for high-definition TV.

And as for the most recent instalments... as I've said before, far from making the Borg more frightening, they made the Borg appear dumb and silly; really, Resistance and Before Dishonour went as far to make the Borg less credible as a foe than VOY ever did. And that's a shaky foundation to build more Borg stories on. With any luck, these stories will feature actual Borg, the uncaring and unstoppable, and not the stupidity-plagued, revenge-driven examples we've seen of late.

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For what it's worth... post-"Endgame," the Borg are fragmented. The Borg cube that attacked in Resistance and Before Dishonor was acting alone. That's why they had to create their own Queen. So what happened in those books wouldn't really be a foundation for stories about other Borg. (Well, the Borg in Greater Than the Sum are the last surviving offshoot of those Borg, but they're more the McGuffin for GTTS than the foundation of it.)

And as for the most recent instalments... as I've said before, far from making the Borg more frightening, they made the Borg appear dumb and silly; really, Resistance and Before Dishonour went as far to make the Borg less credible as a foe than VOY ever did. And that's a shaky foundation to build more Borg stories on. With any luck, these stories will feature actual Borg, the uncaring and unstoppable, and not the stupidity-plagued, revenge-driven examples we've seen of late.

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For what it's worth... post-"Endgame," the Borg are fragmented. The Borg cube that attacked in Resistance and Before Dishonor was acting alone. That's why they had to create their own Queen. So what happened in those books wouldn't really be a foundation for stories about other Borg. (Well, the Borg in Greater Than the Sum are the last surviving offshoot of those Borg, but they're more the McGuffin for GTTS than the foundation of it.)

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So...it's about the journey, not the destination, right? Which is exactly how it should be.

And I think that when it comes to the Borg, people don't want the 15-foot tall lizard monster; they want the shadow in the closet, the creak in the night. They want the mindless force of nature, the monster that wants to eat you -- not the sociopathic megalomaniac with bad skin that the Borg became in the form of the Queen.

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Personally, I think a mindless force of nature can be a great adversary for one story, maybe even two, but not on a continuing basis. What the Borg originally were, they can never quite become again, because as you say, it's the unknown that's truly frightening, and you can't unlearn knowledge.

So the key is not to go backward and try to recapture the essence of "Q Who" or "The Best of Both Worlds." The key is to find something new to say about them, or about the consequences of their existence.

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Personally, if I was the person making the creative choice, I would just stop using the Borg and drop the concept, because I don't find them particularly interesting on anything other than a monster-in-the-closet level, but that's just me. Your approach is valid, too -- but I don't even want a Borg that is anything other than a monster that wants to eat me, so there's a fundamental creative difference there.

not to mention the NX-02 storyline has just been lifted from the SOTL calendar.

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Which may have been planted in the calendar on purpose, so a future novel could pick up the thread. Remember, Marco once had DS9 Relaunch characters dropped into a Wildstorm comic mini-series ("DS9: n-Vector"), and a novel duology ("TNG: Maximum Warp"), as a sort of preview of "Avatar".

Which may have been planted in the calendar on purpose, so a future novel could pick up the thread. Remember, Marco once had DS9 Relaunch characters dropped into a Wildstorm comic mini-series ("DS9: n-Vector"), and a novel duology ("TNG: Maximum Warp"), as a sort of preview of "Avatar".

Of course, this is just my personal speculation.

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But somehow your speculations seem to be getting wilder and wilder lately. You're reading hidden motives and secret plans into everything that happens in the book line.

The calendar images are created by Hollywood special-effects artists based on what they want to see. The only reason Pocket is able to do these calendars at all is because these busy, high-paid creators are willing and eager to participate, so they're given a lot of creative freedom to come up with whatever they want, rather than being given marching orders by the editors. If something comes along in a book that's based on an image in the calendars, it's far more realistic to conclude that the writer or editor was inspired by a really cool calendar image.

Heck, I've certainly given some thought to figuring out ways to work a SotL image or two into my fiction. And it wouldn't be the first time that a story was inspired by a piece of artwork. There have been cases where magazine editors have commissioned authors to write stories based on pre-existing illustrations or paintings. (See DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars.")

If something comes along in a book that's based on an image in the calendars, it's far more realistic to conclude that the writer or editor was inspired by a really cool calendar image.

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True. For example, this applies to Admiral Ross's background as described in The Future Begins. Ever since I saw that image of escape pods leaving their damaged ship in the calendar (2002?), I wanted to do something with it, and even went so far as to plot a story that was, in some way, tFB's predecessor.

I've been reading through this thread and have been wondering will Mission Gamma 4 book Lesser Evil tie into the Destiny storyline? I recall they found out the Borg had been in the Gamma Quadrant. Will this be mentioned in the book. Since Dax was on the Defiant when found the former starfleet ship had been assimilated by the borg had crashed on an unnamed planet.I'm also curious as to how the NXo2 Columbia ended up in the Gamma Quadrant.